Singularities: technoculture, transhumanism, and science fiction in the 21st Century【翻译】

A spectre is haunting contemporary technoculture: the spectre of Singularity. Ten
years into a century thus far characterized chiefly by the catastrophic failure of global
economic and political systems, deepening ecological anxieties, and slow-motion social
crisis, the only sector of our collective cultural myth of Progress still vibrantly intact is
the technological – a project which, in vivid contrast to the systemic failure that
seemingly prevails at nearly every other level, continues to charge forward at breakneck
speed. Since the late twentieth century, prompted by the all-but-exponential growth of
machine intelligence and global information networks, and by the still largely obscure but
increasingly profound-seeming implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and
fabulists alike have postulated an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of
human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed in a sudden explosion of
technological development. This moment of transcendence, it is supposed, is at most only
a few years off; indeed, some say, it may have already begun.
The “Singularity” – a term coined in 1986 by the mathematician and science
fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and subsequently adopted throughout technocultural
discourse – is at present the primary site of interpenetration between technoscientific and
science-fictional figurations of the future, an area in which the longstanding binary
distinctions between science and SF, and between present and future, are rapidly
dissolving. As much as the Singularity thesis implies a total reorganization of society and
of the self – which posthumanist cultural studies and cyborg theory have already begun
mapping – it also poses a daunting existential challenge to the enterprise of SF itself, to
the extent that the Singularity imposes what Vinge has described as “an opaque wall
across the future,” an impenetrable cognitive obstacle beyond which the extrapolative
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imagination cannot glimpse. For a genre long defined by its efforts to assert, through the
narrative technique of extrapolation, a meaningful continuity between present and future,
the Singularity presents a thorny problem indeed, demanding both a reevaluation of SF’s
conception of and orientation toward the future, and a new narrative model capable of
grappling with the alien and often paradoxical complexity of the postsingular.
This study is an inquiry into the properties and problematics of Singularity across
fictional and nonfictional discourses, and as such it operates on two levels. Reading
Singularitarian literature against a broadly articulated context of fringe-science and
transhumanist movements, consumer culture, political and economic theory, and related
areas of contemporary cyber- and technoculture, I examine how the metaphor of
Singularity structures and signifies the aspirations and anxieties of late-twentieth and
early twenty-first century technocivilization. As a project of literary criticism specifically,
the study works to identify and theorize a grouping of texts that is emerging from
cyberpunk and postcyberpunk tendencies in contemporary SF, organized around the
premises of Singularity and the posthuman, and classifiable primarily in terms of an
attempt to mount a response to the formal and conceptual problems Vinge has identified.
Primary readings are drawn from a wide-ranging selection of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury
technocultural fiction, with emphasis on SF works by Charles Stross, Cory
Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and William Gibson.
Abstract Approved: _______________________________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
_______________________________________________________
Title and Department
_______________________________________________________
Date
SINGULARITIES:
TECHNOCULTURE, TRANSHUMANISM, AND
SCIENCE FICTION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
by
Joshua Thomas Raulerson
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa
May 2010
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Brooks Landon
Copyright by
JOSHUA THOMAS RAULERSON
2010
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
________________________
PH.D. THESIS
___________
This is to certify that the Ph. D. thesis of
Joshua Thomas Raulerson
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the
Doctor of Philosophy degree in English at the May 2010 graduation.
Thesis Committee: _______________________________________________________
Brooks Landon, Thesis Supervisor
_______________________________________________________
David Depew
_______________________________________________________
Claire Fox
_______________________________________________________
Loren Glass
_______________________________________________________
Laura Rigal
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For Amy, the strongest person I know
and Greta, who embodies the living future-present
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Of the many people – teachers, colleagues, family and friends – without whom
this project would not have been completed, a few in particular merit special recognition.
My profound thanks are due Brooks Landon and Rob Latham, whose intellectual
generosity, editorial guidance, professional and procedural wisdom, and words of
encouragement were instrumental in seeing my work through a long and often highly
nonlinear process of development. Many thanks also to my dissertation writing group of
Mark Bresnan and Charlie Williams, and to Derek Oja, Graham Raulerson, and Mark
Dowdy – friends and colleagues who have graciously allowed themselves to be subjected
to various fragments, drafts, and half-baked notions over the years, and who have greatly
expanded my horizons as a reader. I rely additionally on the formidable scientific
knowledge and research assistance of Charlie Sojka and David Chevalier, both highly
capable and accomplished technology professionals who bear no responsibility for my
inexpert handling of technical concepts in these pages, and whose friendship, more
importantly, I cherish. And I am deeply grateful for the assistance of Katie Bennett, who
does not give legal advice but is exceedingly well versed in matters of copyright and
intellectual property.
The debt I owe my parents, Tom and Melanie Raulerson, is incalculable; this
accomplishment would never have been possible without their unfailing love and support,
their unwavering belief in my abilities, and the values they instilled in their children. I
thank my sister Leah, whose courage and commitment to her own work are a daily
inspiration, and my brother Gray, whose kindness and passion for ideas make him the
kind of scholar and teacher I aspire to be. Finally, and above all, no one has contributed
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more to the fulfillment of this effort, nor to my own personal growth and happiness, than
Amy – my spouse, partner, teacher, and best friend – and Greta – my daughter, my joy
and my hope. They are my strength and the music in my life, and with their love I can do
anything.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................vii
CHAPTER I SINGULARITIES ...................................................................................1
Exponentialist historiography: an introduction.................................................................5
“An opaque wall across the future”................................................................................10
The punchbowl and the fishbowl: postcyberpunk, postsingular metafiction, and the
crisis in SF.........................................................................................................17
Singularity and ideology................................................................................................25
Context and terminology: what we talk about when we talk about the posthuman..........29
Three Singularities ........................................................................................................37
CHAPTER II HOW WE BECAME POST-POSTHUMAN: POSTCYBERPUNK
BODIES AND THE NEW MATERIALITY..........................................53
“How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”: minds, matter, markets.................................60
Self and skin: Diaspora and the postcyberpunk critique of uploading.............................74
SF’s body-image problem: cyberpunk and its discontents..............................................87
The other side of the screen: SF and the materiality of the hyperreal..............................95
Accelerando: bodies, matter, and postcyberpunk politics ............................................. 103
Proof of concept: “doing the locative” in contemporary popular technoculture ............ 109
CHAPTER III THE MOST RADICAL BREAK: SINGULARITY AS
REVOLUTION.................................................................................... 119
Not a revolution: the Singularity that wasn’t................................................................ 123
Out-of-control capitalism and the “new spiritualism”................................................... 136
Information Revolution and the return of the (Marxist) repressed ................................ 142
The Cyber-Marxian Singularity................................................................................... 146
Baudrillard and the impossible revolution of symbolic exchange................................. 153
CHAPTER IV SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE, FREE CULTURE, AND THE
POSTSINGULAR GENERAL ECONOMY......................................... 164
Baudrillard reloaded.................................................................................................... 164
The postcyberpunk gift: network economies of reciprocity.......................................... 169
Cracking the code: Free Culture and the end of property.............................................. 183
Free hardware: nanotechnology and the means of production ...................................... 198
Property, posthuman rights, and social justice.............................................................. 211
“Just gaming”: labor and leisure in postcyberpunk general economy ........................... 221
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CHAPTER V THE LAST QUESTION: ENTROPY, EXTROPY, AND
TRANSHUMANIST ESCHATOLOGY, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO
STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE SINGULARITY ..................... 233
A brief history of postwar entropic literature ............................................................... 243
Beyond the nuclear sublime......................................................................................... 246
“Today we are higher than yesterday”: cybernetics and counter-entropic consolation .. 253
Infodynamics and the post-cybernetic infocalypse ....................................................... 260
“Screw the end of the world”: SF and anti-eschatological epistemology ...................... 275
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................... 290

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